Numinous Image

Jung distinguishes the archetype as a mere name from the archetype as living experience by the criterion of numinosity. “One can speak of an archetype only when these two aspects coincide. When there is only an image, it is merely a word-picture, like a corpuscle with no electric charge. It is then of little consequence, just a word and nothing more. But if the image is charged with numinosity, that is, with psychic energy, then it becomes dynamic and will produce consequences” (Jung 1976, CW 18). The phrase archetype is living matter marks the line. An image catalogued is not yet an image met.

This is the clinical criterion by which archaic remnants are distinguished from cultural furniture. The same figure — the number thirteen, the cross, a lion — may appear in two dreams and mean two different things; the interpretive question is whether the image arrives charged or discharged. “In one case it is a still numinous representation; in the other it is stripped of its original emotionality and has assumed the innocuous character of a mere piece of indifferent information” (Jung 1976, CW 18). Only the charged instance repays amplification; the other is an ordinary symbol in ordinary commerce.

The numinous image is not a separate category of archetype but a phenomenological condition under which any archetype becomes real to a given psyche at a given time. It is what permits Jung to say that the archetype is not a concept but a piece of life, not limitlessly exchangeable, always belonging to the economy of the living individual.

Relationships

• archetype
• archetypal-image
• archaic-remnants
• amplification
• imago

Primary sources

• Jung 1976, CW 18 (The Symbolic Life), §§588–590